Maggie's Farm

Things brought home from Italy, Part 3

1. Don't judge a church by its cover. You could walk past San Lorenzo or Santo Spirito, (photo) for just two examples, with their original, undecorated mortar or stucco surfaces, and hardly give them a glance. Wrong, as Jim Cramer would say. Them oysters contain magnificent pearls.

2. Those Eyewitness Travel Guides, like this one, are absolutely the best. For depth, you need to read something else but they are handy-dandy, full of basic info and good ideas.

(DK Publishing also produces the Eyewitness series for young people on a variety of subjects, which are hugely informative and enjoyable, with tons of great pictures and good detail. I've read every one in our house at least once: they are good for adults, too. To call them picture books does not do them justice.)

Some things brought home from Italy, Part 2

1. Savonarola was an interesting dude. Worth a piece when I get the chance, if only for my own education. One of the precursors of Luther, among many others, in retrospect: voices crying in the wilderness and vox clematis in deserto too.

2. Art Museums are Art Cemeteries.

3. Botticelli's 1489 Annunciation is the most compelling painting I have ever seen - and I've seen my share of them. Even though it is in the Uffizi Art Cemetery. Will post it today.

4. Cosimo Vecchio's family line contained the "good Medicis". Cosimo l's line were the "bad Medicis". History made simple.

5. I am not fascinated by High Renaissance art and architecture.

Medieval Alley

Just one of
hundreds of these dark, narrow alleys in central Firenze. Most have colorful laundry hanging from windows, but this one unfortunately did not have much in the way of interesting laundry.

Some things brought home from Italy, Part 1

Hadn't been there in four years, and it is always a stimulating visit for us Yankees with our cold, northern European blood.

1. Art does not progress, or improve, or even evolve...it just changes, like fashion.

2. "Duomo" doesn't really translate as "dome" - it generally refers to the seat of the Bishop, as does cattedrale. Other large cities have their duomos.

3. The year a building was built means little: over hundreds of years, they are changed, so that any old building contains the accretions, remodelings and re-decoratings of history. Witness the "modern" facade of the endlessly-photographed Firenze Duomo, which I refuse to photograph: it's faux antique and over-done.

4. In 1400, Firenze was one of the largest and wealthiest cities in the world. Making fabric from English wool, leather, but especially banking. It was a seaport: the Arno was navigable up to Firenze until the "bad" Medicis dammed and blocked it for military purposes.

5. I need to find time to learn Italian.

The Quarter Million Dollar "Duh"

Justin takes on Dr. Kass on the general subject of what women want, which Dr. Kass profoundly and perceptively concluded was a relationship with a man!

What is really needed is an article by a woman on what men really want. Guess we can ask Dr. Bliss to do that one, but it won't be pretty.

The Baptistery of San Giovanni

The ceiling of this 9th Century octagonal chapel, which stands as you know on the piazza in front of the wedding-cake-looking 19th Century facade of Cattedrale di Santa Maria del Fiore (Firenze's Duomo), is Byzantine in style. Those medieval Byzantine artistic conventions had staying power and remained influential through the early and mid-Renaissance and, to my mind, they remain powerful. (In his later years, even Botticelli returned to them, as I learned last week, due at least in part to the influence of the evangelical friar Girolamo Savonarola.)

La Passegiata

Every evening, the whole town comes out for la passegiata - the evening stroll - and puts on la bella figura, followed by a late supper.

My theory is that the ladies lead the men down the shopping streets, where the shops remain open until 7 or 8.

The main problem with the Italian economy, in my opinion, is not so much the lack of work ethic - although there is that minor issue - it's that everyone spends all of their money on cigarettes, wine, and fashion. How many shoes does a lady need?

This photo in Firenze, this past Friday evening. Che bella vita.

Insects of the Week: The Worst Bugs in History

Garfinkle in Wired News:

Last month automaker Toyota announced a recall of 160,000 of its Prius hybrid vehicles following reports of vehicle warning lights illuminating for no reason, and cars' gasoline engines stalling unexpectedly. But unlike the large-scale auto recalls of years past, the root of the Prius issue wasn't a hardware problem -- it was a programming error in the smart car's embedded code. The Prius had a software bug.

With that recall, the Prius joined the ranks of the buggy computer -- a club that began in 1945 when engineers found a moth in Panel F, Relay #70 of the Harvard Mark II system.¹The computer was running a test of its multiplier and adder when the engineers noticed something was wrong. The moth was trapped, removed and taped into the computer's logbook with the words: "first actual case of a bug being found.

Read entire.

Phone Options: Should I Switch?

(This piece from a guest writer, fellow hunter, and our local tech whiz and tech biz whiz, on whom we should rely more often for these highly-paid contributions to Maggie's.)

Times are changing. Did you know that if you have broadband internet service you now have a viable option to replace your old telephone? Why would you change?  There are some good reasons to do so, and relatively few not to. It's a real problem for Ma Bell, but not so for you and me. It is called Voice over Internet Protocol, or VOIP for short.

What is VOIP (Voice over internet protocol)?  As you may have figured out it is basically phone service over the internet, but you don't use your computer - you use your regular telephone.  Huh?  That's right.  If you get a call your phone rings - not your computer. Here is how it works: You sign up for the service using the provider of you choice (Vonage is a solid provider of voip service, but there are several to choose from). Next you receive a small interface box from your provider which you then plug into your broadband modem with one plug and plug the other end into your phone jack and you are done. Basically, anyone who can plug in a vacuum cleaner can accomplish this task. Now you are ready to make your first Voip call. Estimated install time 10 min ( less than 2 min for your average Maggie's farm reader).

Q&A

Does a call sound different? No

Does my phone ring or does my computer ring? Phone rings.

What if I dial 911? The earliest versions of Voip had some issues but today there are rules in place that require providers to provide emergency dialing, so it is no longer a big drawback.

What if the power goes out?  This is the biggest issue. If the power goes out your telephone will work but your VOIP won't (but neither will your cordless phones).  The main reason is because the modem needs electricity to work.  You can for a small investment buy an APC unit.

There are a few other small issues that could arise. For example, your alarm company may not be able to monitor your home over VOIP but these, like many other tiny issues will get resolved with time.

But why change?  The answer is money. Voip service is cheap. Usually for a flat fee like 20 p/m you get unlimited calls in the US and Canada, Caller ID and Call waiting for a flat rate. Everything is included for free.  The Bell companies charge a line fee + caller id + call waiting + usage fees. What you usually wind up with is something that looks a lot more expensive than Voip that isn't any better. Are you ready to switch?  I haven't yet, but I'm about to.

(Photo is the Western Electric Model 417, in production from 1907-1937)

A Joke

for our readers, while we are away:

Jim has his 6oth birthday, and decides it's time to get himself together. He exercises and diets, loses 30 pounds, dyes his hair brown, buys a new fashionable wardrobe, gets some Botox and a little chin work done.

Shortly thereafter, he is run over by a truck as he struts out of the gym.

 "Gosh" he says to God, "Why now? I finally got my act together, and I've been a good guy."

"Woops, Jim, I am so sorry." says God. "I didn't recognize you."

A quote from Blue Highways, by William Least Heat-Moon, travelling through Texas:

"A massive, squared mound, quite unlike the surrounding hills, rose from a level valley; it had been the central element in a Caddoan Indian village a thousand years ago. I took a sandwich and climbed to the top to eat in the low undergrowth of wild blackberry bushes. There I was - a resident from the age of lunch meat, no-lead, and Ziploc bags - sitting on a thousand-year-old civic center.

The aura of time the mound gave off seemed to mock any comprehension of its change and process - how had it grown from baskets of shoveled soil to the high center of Caddoan affairs to a hilly patch of blackberries? My rambling metaphysics was getting caught in the trap of reducing experience to coherence and meaning, letting the perplexity of things disrupt the joy in their mystery. To insist that diligent thought would bring an understanding of change was to limit life to the comprehensible."

Dalrymple

There is a fine education in going to City Journal, and searching Dalrymple under "author". This Brit has been a prolific writer and thinker for years in that excellent journal, but our alert and intelligent readers have pointed me to one piece in particular of his, from 1995, Do Sties Make Pigs?, apropos of the French rioting. It's a case study of the law of unintended consequences, and of government's wealth, hubris, and lack of common sense. I quote here:

"But it is public housing that exemplifies most clearly the ideas of those who transformed the British urban landscape during the 1950s and 1960s. Here the new aesthetics combined with socialist reforming zeal to produce a multilayered disaster. 

After the war, bien pensants universally agreed that pre-war British society had been grossly unjust. The working class, it was said, had been shamelessly exploited, as was manifest principally in Britain's great inequalities of income and its overcrowded housing. A sharply progressive income tax (which at one point reached 95 percent) would redress the inequalities of income, while slum clearance and the construction of large- scale housing projects would alleviate the housing problem. 

The middle class reformers thought of poverty wholly in physical terms: an insufficiency of food and warmth, a lack of space. How, they asked, could people come to the finer things in life if their basic requirements were so inadequately met? What could freedom mean (I remember my father asking) in the absence of decent housing conditions? Since social problems such as crime and delinquency (which we were soon to discover were in their infancy) were attributable to physical deprivation—to the environment rather than the criminal or delinquent—the construction of decent housing would solve all problems at once.

But what was decent housing? A civil servant, Parker Morris, provided the answer: a certain number of cubic yards of living space per inhabitant. The Ministry of Housing adopted the Parker Morris standards for all public housing; they governed the size and number of rooms—and that was all."

Read entire.

GODDAMMO

For the unhappily divorced, keychain bullets made out of your wedding band. Reminds me of the old line: "I still miss her, but my aim's getting better."

Vermont Barbecue: Curtis'

Now I ask our Southern readers: Does this look real? It is.

Euro-weenies

Short report at LGF. Afraid to speak out against Jihad? Pathetic, especially when rationalizing timidity as "sensitivity." How sensitive do you want to be towards people who want to kill you and turn your country into an extension of the caliphate? Do you imagine that those who have contempt for you will react warmly to your weakness? What would Winston say? How would Adolph react?

But if you don't care what they would say, hey, why not just give your country away to them, you sanctimonious Euro-weenies, and move to the US, where we try to have a little more self-respect and courage and appreciation of our heritage, and also appreciate the virtues of firearms?

And when you come, just wade across the Rio Grande via Mexico in your Le Chameau wellies. You'll get more sympathy and better benefits that way than if you try the whole silly legal paperwork visa hassle, and our immigration is tilted against Europeans anyway thanks to the bozo NJ Dem Peter Rodino years ago. And the guards won't be able to confiscate your stash of Cuban cigars. If you do stumble into some Immigration government folks with sidearms, just say "Jose Gonzales, no speaka Inglese." They will leave you alone. Or you can always try the reliable "These aren't the droids you're looking for," if The Force is with you. Which it isn't, obviously.